Speech analysis for the determination or classification of aspects of the speaker is well known in the prior art. Multiple patents describe speech analysis for the purposes of detecting the emotion in a user and providing feedback (e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,151,571, 5,647,834). Other patents describe detection of stress (U.S. Pat. No. 3,855,416), deception (U.S. Pat. No. 3,855,416), nervousness (U.S. Pat. No. 6,427,137), suicidal predisposition (U.S. Pat. No. 4,675,904), etc. Common to all this prior art is the concept of detecting autonomic responses in the user voice (i.e. while speaking, the user's current physiological state appears in features within their voices).
While these prior systems utilize speech analysis to determine the emotion or physiological state of a speaker, it is desirable to understand the impact of a user's speech behavior on an audience of one or more. Generally, speech behavior is not an autonomic response. For example, a speaker can be angry and condescending as well as neutral and condescending. In both cases, the speaker's audience would ascribe a condescending speaking behavior to the speaker.
Devices, Systems, and methods for detecting and notifying the user of poor speech behavior have been disclosed in prior art.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,705,869 discloses a “system and method for interactive communications skill training” that “includes the steps of analyzing the user interaction by an expert and providing the expert analysis to the user via the communication network for review by the user to interactively learn the communication skill.”
U.S. Pat. No. 7,818,179 discloses devices and methods “for automatically analyzing a user's conversation or verbal presentation and providing feedback to the user, in real-time and/or off-line, to make the user aware of improper speech habits and thus enable the user to acquire better language habits while speaking.” Where “An identified speech habit comprises exceeding a range of volume of speaking a word or expression specified in the vocabulary list that are identified during the speech session.”
U.S. Pat. No. 7,941,318 discloses a “public speaking self-evaluation tool that helps a user practice public speaking in terms of avoiding undesirable words or sounds, maintaining a desirable speech rhythm, and ensuring that the user is regularly glancing at the audience.”
U.S. Pat. No. 8,340,968 discloses a “computer-implemented method for automatically training diction of a person” based on “detection of one of the predefined undesirable phrases in the speech data stream”.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,457,967 discloses a “procedure to automatically evaluate the spoken fluency of a speaker by prompting the speaker to talk on a given topic, recording the speaker's speech to get a recorded sample of speech, and then analyzing the patterns of disfluencies in the speech to compute a numerical score to quantify the spoken fluency skills of the speakers”.
U.S. Application US2007/0250318 discloses a “system for providing automatic quality management regarding a level of conformity to a specific accent”.
While these prior systems provide methods for the evaluation or identification of certain aspects of speaking behavior, it is desirable for users to be made aware of the impact of their behavior on an audience. In this context, speaking behavior can cause an audience of 1 or more people to view the speaker as condescending, whining, nagging, weak, manipulative, likeable, confident, arrogant, aggressive, tentative, energetic, engaging, instructional, sincere, etc. It is further desirable that this awareness of the impact of user's historical speech behavior be made available for the user to review sometime in the future at their leisure. It is yet further desirable for the awareness to be automatic and without the need of human experts evaluating user behavior so that the cost to users for this invention is limited.